Setting up eMac's at school - FileServer Solution?

My School has wisely decided to fit out the Music 'suite' (which until now was just 4 broken PC's ) with 6-8 spanking new eMacs.

The Media Studies Department has 12. They have over 100 pupils using their computers, but they connect to the local WINNT4 server and save all their work to their user accounts, or if they're doing video editing, to one of the Lacie Ext. HDD's.

However, that's not really the solution the music dept. wants or can afford...

The eMacs will be wired into the school network, but I was wondering - is there a good solution to having each of the pupils (there's only about 15 of us spread over both year groups) having their own 'user name' and being able to log onto any of the macs at any time and get access to their files - WITHOUT us buying a Server??

I think it'd be easier to just have one account for all the machines. If you want a place to save stuff too, buy one Firewire drive (no need to be Lacie, they're really expensive anyway) and hook it to an eMac (preferably the teacher/professor's computer) and download SharePoints and share that drive over the network. Or, another solution is to use an older Mac (I'm sure you can find one on campus) and buy an internal drive and do the same with sharepoints. If your campus doesn't have an older mac to spare, (B/W G3 or newer) I'm sure you could 'prolly' get away with buying a used PowerMac in the place of one eMac and buy like a 120GB secondary drive for it.

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